Sunday, April 16, 2017

Russia Wants Its Future Tanks To Fire Small Battlefield Nuclear Weapons

T-14 tanks with the Armata Universal Combat Platforms. © SPUTNIK/ EVGENY BIYATOV

Next Big Future: Russia developing 152 mm tank gun and small battlefield nuclear weapons

instead of its current 2A82 125 mm gun. The 2A83 gun has a high-speed APFSDS shell with a 1,980 m/s muzzle velocity, only dropping to 1,900 m/s at 2 km.

However, Russian engineers have so far kept the 125 mm-size gun, assessing that improvements in ammunition could be enough to increase effectiveness, while concluding that a larger bore weapon would offer few practical advantage.

Russia is both miniaturizing the nuclear warheads and using sub-kiloton low-yield warheads. Battlefield nuclear weapons could be pared with the larger tank gun.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: These miniature nuclear weapons always make me nervous because of security concerns in keeping these weapons under lock and key. In the wrong hands a miniaturised nuclear weapon with a 500 ton yield can be incredibly devastating if used by a terror group in a major city.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Bolo

Jay Farquharson said...

The Soviets started work on a 152mm tank gun in the late '70's. They got as far as the Objyct 292, a single T-80 up-gunned with the 152mm gun.

While the range and penetration went way up, firing rate dropped big time,(size and weight of the ammo), ammo load went way down,( ditto), space in the turret, never great, became miserable, accuracy did not increase, weight of the gun, even with counterballences, destabilized the tank making firing on the move almost impossible, tank speed, fuel economy, ( already bad) and mobility went down.